Beat The Devil

By RICHARD CORLISS

When the devil offers you seven wishes, you'd better have Henry Kissinger or Johnnie Cochran nearby to read the small print. For a start, you'll probably get only six; for another, Beelzebub has an impish sense of foul play that turns any wish into a curse. Ask to be rich, powerful and married to your dream girl and--poof!--you'll become a cuckolded drug lord. Say you want to be a star athlete, and you'll be missing some important jock equipment. Request a smart Satanic comedy, and you'll get this bag of old tricks.

Bedazzled, a Faust farce directed by Harold Ramis, is quite close in silhouette to the Peter Cook-Dudley Moore Bedazzled of 1967--with the petty distinction that the old film was funny, the new one mostly not. A lonely dweeb (Brendan Fraser) is so desperate to win the affections of a co-worker (Frances O'Connor) that he signs a pact with the Horned One (Elizabeth Hurley) that offers him seven shots at ecstasy for his puny little soul. Alas, the skitcom format soon becomes tiresome; comic inventiveness should have been Ramis' first wish.

Can't fault the stars. Fraser is that lovely commodity, a big man with physical grace and an underdog charm. He's drollest in his early scenes as the consummate loser with a coprophagous grin--a character perilously close to Rob Schneider's needy-nerdy copy-machine guy on Saturday Night Live years ago. (Similarly, O'Connor looks so much like the younger Kathie Lee Gifford that she could be accused of face-lifting.) Hurley slinks through her role with the purr and swagger of a dominatrix in the Profumo years. Her lithe body has the sexy lines that are often missing from the script of this underachieving immorality play.

--R.C.